Argument Strength is in the Eye of the Beholder: Audience Effects in Persuasion

Americans spend about a third of their time online, with many participating in online conversations on social and political issues. We hypothesize that social media arguments on such issues may be more engaging and persuasive than traditional media summaries, and that particular types of people may be more or less convinced by particular styles of argument, e.g. emotional arguments may resonate with some personalities while factual arguments resonate with others. We report a set of experiments testing at large scale how audience variables interact with argument style to affect the persuasiveness of an argument, an under-researched topic within natural language processing. We show that belief change is affected by personality factors, with conscientious, open and agreeable people being more convinced by emotional arguments.Comment: European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2017

Theoretical foundations for illocutionary structure parsing

Illocutionary structure in real language use is intricate and complex, and nowhere more so than in argument and debate. Identifying this structure without any theoretical scaffolding is extremely challenging even for humans. New work in Inference Anchoring Theory has provided significant advances in such scaffolding which are helping to allow the analytical challenges of argumentation structure to be tackled. This paper demonstrates how these advances can also pave the way to automated and semi-automated research in understanding the structure of natural debate. This paper is the extended version of the paper presented at the 11th International Conference on Computational Models of Natural Argument (CMNA 2013), 14 June 2013, Rome, Italy. It reports on the initial steps of a project on argument mining from dialogue. Note that since then the corpus size and the annotation scheme have evolved, however, the method presented here is still valid and the project has developed accordingly

Natural Law and the Regulation of Sexuality: A Critique

I will argue that the natural-law understanding of sexuality, and its application to the law, is deeply flawed, in regards to homosexuality and sodomy. I begin by laying out some of the foundations of the natural law position. Central to the position is an account of human goods that are seen as good in themselves, and hence as rational bases for choice and human action. In regards to sexuality, the two most important goods, at least from the natural law perspective, are those of marriage and personal integration. I argue that a real appreciation of the role of these two goods in human life would lead to a practical political stance very different than the one put forward by contemporary natural law theorists. Much of the argument here is concerned with showing how the natural law position, taken on its own terms, should actually support a position that is, for example, at least as skeptical of modem corporate practices as it is of consensual sodomy. Second, I argue that the account of the human goods offered by natural law theorists is very culturally specific and even partially contingent, even though it claims to be premised upon timeless reason and an unchanging account of human goods. This argument involves a historical foray into ancient Greek understandings of sexuality in order to get a sense of the range of understandings across time. If this critical point is correct, natural law theory does not have good grounds for much of its condemnation of a whole range of sexual practices

Natural Law and the Regulation of Sexuality: A Critique

I will argue that the natural-law understanding of sexuality, and its application to the law, is deeply flawed, in regards to homosexuality and sodomy. I begin by laying out some of the foundations of the natural law position. Central to the position is an account of human goods that are seen as good in themselves, and hence as rational bases for choice and human action. In regards to sexuality, the two most important goods, at least from the natural law perspective, are those of marriage and personal integration. I argue that a real appreciation of the role of these two goods in human life would lead to a practical political stance very different than the one put forward by contemporary natural law theorists. Much of the argument here is concerned with showing how the natural law position, taken on its own terms, should actually support a position that is, for example, at least as skeptical of modem corporate practices as it is of consensual sodomy. Second, I argue that the account of the human goods offered by natural law theorists is very culturally specific and even partially contingent, even though it claims to be premised upon timeless reason and an unchanging account of human goods. This argument involves a historical foray into ancient Greek understandings of sexuality in order to get a sense of the range of understandings across time. If this critical point is correct, natural law theory does not have good grounds for much of its condemnation of a whole range of sexual practices

The Idea of Absolute Ethical Life: Hegel’s Account of Freedom and Natural Law in His Early Philosophical Works

This dissertation project focuses on G.W.F. Hegel’s early philosophical writings, though primarily on the Natural Law essay (1802/3), and how, through those writings, Hegel positions himself in relation to other thinkers, such as Fichte. Broadly, the modern period saw with it the rise of accounts of what is called natural law. Philosophers prior to Hegel argued that the proper account of natural law must be rooted in some kind of universal framework: either the basis of law must be the shared empirical facts of human nature (empiricism), or the basis of law must be found in the universal demands on what it means to be a rational being (a priorism). Hegel’s essay presents a compelling argument for why such accounts for natural law are inadequate. The first part of this dissertation engages in the exegetical project of understanding Hegel’s critique of prior philosophical methods for generating accounts of natural law. Through an engagement with Fichte’s philosophical works related to the sciences of morality and legality, I recapitulate Hegel’s critique of key elements within Fichte’s philosophical system. These critiques focus on what Hegel argues are the problematic aspects of a philosophical system that is rooted in merely the concept of the Absolute, a one-sided articulation of reality that gives undue primacy to the subjective aspect of human life. I argue that these critiques frame the important philosophical insights that Hegel brings to bear on his account of natural law. Next, I provide an account of why Hegel thinks that the philosophical programs of empiricism and a priorism fail to capture the heart of what it means to think about law within a community. The second part of this dissertation provides an account of Hegel’s conception of absolute ethical life and its ramifications on our thinking about communal life. Beginning with Hegel’s conception of freedom, I explore Hegel’s argument for why a domain of meaning that is prior to individual reveals itself in both positive and negative ways. Furthermore, I show that this argument sets the stage for articulating the impossibility of a system of laws that address the real demands of freedom. Hegel’s argument for why the underlying logic of ethical life is on a path towards a point of indifference provides a compelling answer to the question of how we should understand the relationship between law and the community. One main conclusion of the Natural Law essay is that the basic mode of communal life is grounded in an ongoing tension between the positive content of the community and its institutions and the negative power of the individual to either participate or deny the claims of the community. I articulate why, given the logic of ethical life, the basic mode of participating in communal life involves participating in the birth, life, and death of laws, where the truth of this cycle is in the growth and maintenance of the community through its own tragic self-consumption. Furthermore, I argue that the Natural Law essay provides a framework for incorporating the empirical into an account of natural law through history. Finally, I close by offering some insights from Hegel’s account that are relevant to our current dialogues about what it means to live in a community, specifically that his account of natural law places a demand on how we should engage in dialogues within a historical perspective

Paley's iPod: the cognitive basis of the design argument within natural theology

The argument from design stands as one of the most intuitively compelling arguments for the existence of a divine creator. Yet, for many scientists and philosophers, Hume’s critique and Darwin’s theory of natural selection have definitely undermined the idea that we can draw any analogy from design in artifacts to design in nature. Here, we examine empirical studies from developmental and experimental psychology to investigate the cognitive basis of the design argument. From this it becomes clear that humans spontaneously discern purpose in nature. When constructed theologically and philosophically correctly, the design argument is not presented as conclusive evidence for God’s existence, but rather as an abductive, probabilistic argument. We examine the cognitive basis of probabilistic judgments in relationship to natural theology. Placing emphasis on how people assess improbable events, we clarify the intuitive appeal of Paley’s watch analogy. We conclude that the reason why some scientists find the design argument compelling and others do not lies not in any intrinsic differences in assessing design in nature, but rather in the prior probability they place on complexity being produced by chance events or by a Creator. This difference provides atheists and theists with a rational basis for disagreement

Embodying conversational characteristics in a graphical user interface

In the history of Intelligent Tutoring Systems, SOPHIE (Brown, Burton, and Bell, 1974), now considered a classic, contained many important ideas and features. One of these was its natural language user interface. Today, the trend has moved away from natural language interfaces towards graphical ones although the argument in favour of natural language user interfaces, both from Human Computer Interaction and natural language researchers, still persist. Is this argument correct? This thesis explores this question by investigating how SOPHIE might be re-implemented with a graphical direct manipulation interface instead of a natural language one, with the goal of improving its standard of usability. It begins by analysing the features that seem to have been central to SOPHIE's usability. These, it argues, were not so much an ability to accept well formed complete English sentences, as an ability to accept and interpret correctly a wide range of abbreviated inputs. Two models of interaction, Circuit 1, a pilot, and Circuit II, a fairly full implementation of SOPHIE were implemented and tested. Both employ free-order syntax that allows users to specify the components of a full command in any order. The combination of deixis and free-order syntax supported allows completely general ellipsis which achieves, in extended interaction sequences, the same economy and naturalness that SOPHIE achieved through its use of anaphora and ellipsis. Whilst the free-order syntax. technique is little used at present in user interfaces, the results of observational studies conducted have shown that it saves users time and convenience. Thus, considering key linguistic features of a natural language user interface has shown how novel features can enhance the usability of direct manipulation interfaces. This thesis argues that user interfaces can be improved by employing structures found in natural language or at least conversation which can be constructed within direct manipulation interface styles. This approach was further expanded to support topic shifts between different circuit contexts. Circuit II, like SOPHIE, supports three different topics: normal circuit behaviour, a circuit with an unknown fault, and circuits with user-hypothesised faults. Drawing on Reichman's (1981) work, Circuit II uses natural language cue phrases of the type "by the way", re-implemented in the direct manipulation style, to facilitate shifts between topics in a smoother and more natural way than SOPHIE which , used clumsy explicit commands

Toward an Analysis of the Abductive Moral Argument for God’s Existence: Assessing the Evidential Quality of Moral Phenomena and the Evidential Virtuosity of Christian Theological Models

The moral argument for God’s existence is perhaps the oldest and most salient of the arguments from natural theology. In contemporary literature, there has been a focus on the abductive version of the moral argument. Although the mode of reasoning, abduction, has been articulated, there has not been a robust articulation of the individual components of the argument. Such an articulation would include the data quality of moral phenomena, the theoretical virtuosity of theological models that explain the moral phenomena, and how both contribute to the likelihood of moral arguments. The goal of this paper is to provide such an articulation. Our method is to catalog the phenomena, sort them by their location on the emergent hierarchy of sciences, then describe how the ecumenical Christian theological model exemplifies evidential virtues in explaining them. Our results show that moral arguments are neither of the highest or lowest quality yet can be assented to on a principled level of investigation, especially given existential considerations

A Qualitative Analysis of the Persuasive Properties of Argumentation Schemes

Argumentation schemes are generalised patterns that provide a way to (partially) dissociate the content from the reasoning structure of the argument. On the other hand, Cialdini’s principles of persuasion provide a generic model to analyse the persuasive properties of human interaction (e.g., natural language). Establishing the relationship between principles of persuasion and argumentation schemes can contribute to the improvement of the argument-based human-computer interaction paradigm. In this work, we perform a qualitative analysis of the persuasive properties of argumentation schemes. For that purpose, we present a new study conducted on a population of over one hundred participants, where twelve different argumentation schemes are instanced into four different topics of discussion considering both stances (i.e., in favour and against). Participants are asked to relate these argumentation schemes with the perceived Cialdini’s principles of persuasion. From the results of our study, it is possible to conclude that some of the most commonly used patterns of reasoning in human communication have an underlying persuasive focus, regardless of how they are instanced in natural language argumentation (i.e., their stance, the domain, or their content)

A Qualitative Analysis of the Persuasive Properties of Argumentation Schemes

Argumentation schemes are generalised patterns that provide a way to (partially) dissociate the content from the reasoning structure of the argument. On the other hand, Cialdini’s principles of persuasion provide a generic model to analyse the persuasive properties of human interaction (e.g., natural language). Establishing the relationship between principles of persuasion and argumentation schemes can contribute to the improvement of the argument-based human-computer interaction paradigm. In this work, we perform a qualitative analysis of the persuasive properties of argumentation schemes. For that purpose, we present a new study conducted on a population of over one hundred participants, where twelve different argumentation schemes are instanced into four different topics of discussion considering both stances (i.e., in favour and against). Participants are asked to relate these argumentation schemes with the perceived Cialdini’s principles of persuasion. From the results of our study, it is possible to conclude that some of the most commonly used patterns of reasoning in human communication have an underlying persuasive focus, regardless of how they are instanced in natural language argumentation (i.e., their stance, the domain, or their content)